Placement of Items in Containers

[Knight Captain]

I'm trying to mod SIfixes, and finding multiple containers where the normal placement is overridden by improper stacking.

Examples:
Cave to the Frozen North, first chest has coats in a pile.
Chest NE of Sleeping Bull, on the monolith, items are near SE corner inside the container.

Is there a way to fix this other than manually?

[Dominus]

So is it different from the original, meaning Exult is at fault? Or is it that the original messed up?
If it's an original mess, than nothing to do but fixing it manually

[Knight Captain]

I believe that it was messed up by Exult, but don't have DOSbox handy at the moment to confirm. Though I suspect either way the fix is manual.

[Dominus]

can you be much more specific: exact location and whether it happens with normal Exult or just the modded game?

[Gotcha!]

It definitely happens without the SI Fixes mod as well, and it happens in The Black Gate too. This never happens in vanilla, as items are forcefully placed next to one another. e.g. they get automatically sorted.

Locations: There are a ton of locations where items get stacked at the edge/in corners of containers, containers that already exist in the game world as well as containers that are created on the fly (aka dead bodies).
The items are pretty much stacked right on top of each other and can be hard to grab if they're small.

KC named some examples. An example from The Black Gate would be 2 of the chests in the chimney-cheat room, where a bunch of items are stacked on top of each other near the bottom edge.

I thought it was a pretty well-known issue. Surprised by Dominus's reaction.

[Dominus]

I thought it was a different issue

[Knight Captain]

I know it may not be canon, but if/when this gets fixed, having items stay in their locations in a container would be worth considering.

Thanks for confirming this is an Exult issue, Gotcha, and not the map file I'm using. That would be horrible to go back and re-edit from scratch.

[drcode]

Perhaps I'm seeing it by just dropping items on a character, like Iolo at the start. The items aren't all stacked at the edge; but they're not spread out evenly either, and some are on top of each other even though there's lots of room.

[drcode]

I've made an attempt to fix this. You might have to start a new game to see the change.

[Gotcha!]

@DrCode: Thanks!

I won't be playing the games anytime soon (too many play-throughs recently, saturated) but I really appreciate this for inevitable future plays.

People still hammering and tinkering away on/at this game after decades. <3